Customer Reviews

No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale

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This is an exceptionally cool book. It's an eclectic look at how important the things we cannot see are in our daily lives. Have you ever had a pregnancy test? Played a viola? Listened to a vinyl record? Lit a candle? Read this book and learn about what happened at the microscopic level. The pictures are extraordinary, and the text is clear, vibrant and informal. Strongly recommended. Don't miss the section at the end (Five Not-So-Easy Pieces) where the photographer explains how she obtained some of the images. I love the glass apple with the square shadow.

This lovely coffee-table book contains 60 full-page illustrations, each accompanied by an explanatory essay. The illustrations came from Felice Frankel, who is on the staff of both MIT and Harvard; the essays are by George Whitesides, a famous chemist at Harvard.

Combining art and science is not an easy task. The Frankel-Whitesides agenda worked most naturally for the pictures numbered 15 (laminar flow), 37, (microreactor) and 40 (Christmas tree mixer). In all three, Frankel photographed a microchemistry gadget and Whitesides explained how it worked. At the other extreme, the essay accompanying illustration number 58 clearly explains how a fuel cell works but the adjacent photograph shows a crumpled-up sample of the proton-selective membrane taken out of a fuel cell. What did we learn from the photo? The membrane is black and crumples easily. If the membrane had been white and stiff, the fuel cell would still have worked in the way that the essay explained.

Illustration 34 is entitled 'Counting on Two Fingers.' It would have been better entitled 'Counting on One Finger.' The word 'binary' refers to two states of one finger: raised and down.

On pages 153 to 163, Frankel describes the techniques she used to produce the illustrations; it's a fascinating story. However, I got hung up on her explanation of the carbon nanotube, illustration #7 in the book. On page 158, she says that she placed a rolled transparent picture of a graphite sheet on her flatbed scanner and obtained the image that she processed later into the final illustration. I tried the 'cross eyed stereo' test on her final product, and the carbon nanotube stood up in a beautiful, three-dimensional view. The implication is that her final product has perspective; my guess is that she made a camera photograph of the original tube instead of using a flatbed scanner.

Picking on some minor errors doesn't destroy the value of the book. However, it does raise an interesting question. Years ago, one of my friends authored a textbook on oceanography. After the book appeared, messages came trickling in pointing out minor errors in the book. The disturbing part was that no two messages uncovered the same error. My friend said that he could not reject the hypothesis that there were an infinite number of errors in his oceanography book. I'm not saying that No Small Matter contains an infinite number of errors, but when the authors set out to speak for the full range of nanoscale technology they have to beware of the devil that lurks in the details.

For the last couple of days I have been browsing through No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale, a collaboration between art and science that has yielded a stunning new way of looking at a world we never see. The goal is to present through photography a way of looking at and thinking about how life and nature work at the smallest scale.

What I find so powerful about the book is the way in which it leads the reader to understand how little we know about the such fundamental things as water and the role it plays in the chemistry of living and non-living things. That's assuming we know exactly where that line is, which after reading this book you might not be so sure about any more.

This is a wonderful work of art and some of the most lucid science writing I have ever come across. Makes you thing anew about the vast void that exists in our understanding of just about anything.

Most books on nanotechnology are either boring or so far over the average head that they are basically useless. This book is not in either of those categories. Actually it presents the subject through pictures that keep it very interesting. It also helps to open the mind up to the things that go on in our world everyday that we cannot see. It helps us to open our eyes and "see" all those things that we cannot see!

i'm a scientist and i really enjoyed this book. beautiful pictures. now i just need GMW to sign it. :-P

My dad is an amateur scientist and photographer and I got this for him for his birthday...he loved it.